The first industrial robot in history clocked in at a General Motors plant in 1961. Sixty-three years later, humanoids entered series car production too – BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai, BYD. The symmetry is perfect. The numbers are not.

This is the part nobody compiles: who is actually working, who is piloting, who quietly stopped, and who is just talking. Each pairing is graded by the quality of public evidence – not by the press release.

The pattern to know before reading: announce loudly, pilot quietly, end silently.

Humanoid robotics runs on two currencies: demos and promises. Here is what the biggest claims looked like once reality had a chance to respond. Open a claim to see how it aged – some collapsed, one landed on time, one overdelivered.

A fully loaded US worker costs $46.15 an hour. Agility won’t disclose what renting a Digit costs – but it pitches the payback against a $30/hr human, and puts the robot’s operating cost at $10–25 today, heading for $2–5. This one chart is the business case – and the labor fight underneath it.

Forecasts only mean something against a baseline. Here is the entire 2025 humanoid output next to one ordinary year of conventional industrial robots – the machines that already run factories, don’t walk, and don’t give keynotes.

The cleanest split in the data: Chinese makers own volume, price, and the supply chain. American makers own capital and the autonomy frontier. Korea is quietly building the third pole – and aiming at the one thing nobody else dares: a skilled trade.

The strongest case against humanoids comes from people who build robots for a living. It deserves to be read at full strength – followed by the evidence it still has to explain away.

Eight falsifiable things that will settle the argument better than any keynote. Each one has a date or a number attached – when they flip, this ledger gets rewritten.